“Diving grandpas” by the Haihe River in Tianjin drawing a crowd of local residents and tourists Photo: IC PHOTO

The rise of digital communication has infused fresh vitality into the traditional rhythms of urban street life. With the penetration and influence of digital technologies, everyday street activities—once regarded as ordinary—are now gaining online popularity as urban spectacles. The integration of digital media technologies and platforms has opened new channels and created new narratives for the expression and dissemination of street culture. Increasingly, urban residents are either actively engaging in or passively drawn into this spectacle-driven storytelling, through which the city’s daily life, architectural landscapes, cultural atmosphere, and even its spiritual ethos are being reinterpreted and reshaped.

From spectacle-society to digital media spectacles

French philosopher Guy Debord first introduced the concept of the spectacle, arguing that in societies dominated by modern production, life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles—everything once directly experienced is now mediated through representation. In Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle, the urban spectacle is a fragment detached from the whole—a dazzling, fabricated “pseudo-world” that emerged from the rapid economic growth of modern capitalist societies. As German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin observed, from towering skyscrapers to fleeting fads, this utopian vision leaves its mark on countless aspects of everyday life. People encounter urban spectacles in real life, often sharing moments of shock or awe. Yet, the original urban spectacle typically remained an “alienated layer,” separate from the immediacy of daily experience.

Urban spectacle tends to evolve alongside the modernization of cities and the advancement of media technologies, reflecting distinct historical stages. With the arrival of mass media, platforms such as radio, television, and film began to produce new forms of “media spectacle.” In response, American scholar Douglas Kellner developed the concept of the media spectacle, contending that contemporary media spectacles are reshaping social interaction, cultural production, and daily life. Human experience and perception of reality, he argues, are increasingly shaped and mediated by spectacles born of media culture and consumer society.

In the era of digital media, spectacle has become the norm, permeating every aspect of urban and everyday life. In his book The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, Scott McQuire, a professor of Media and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, highlights the integration of digital technology into urban space. As a form of geographic media, new technologies are transforming cities, extending human senses, altering social structures, and reshaping cultural norms—unfolding both the material city and its digital narrative space. Urban screens, contemporary advertising, and skyscrapers all contribute to this urban spectacle, continually altering sensory experiences and ways of living. As digital media technologies penetrate more deeply into daily life, people find themselves increasingly immersed in a spectacle-laden urban environment that seems to be everywhere.

Street life, as a core element of urban storytelling, has undergone a rapid transformation under the performance and reshaping of modern digital media. It is now increasingly characterized by the spectacle of the everyday. This makes it essential to examine more closely how spectacle manifests in street life in the digital era, and to explore the mechanisms through which spectacle-based narratives take shape under the influence of digital media technologies.

Multiple actors co-construct urban spectacles

Douglas Kellner’s notion of “media spectacle” generally refers to reflections of major sociopolitical issues—events that attract broad attention, capture the public imagination, and sometimes even become cultural obsessions. By contrast, the term “urban spectacle” as used here does not refer to large-scale media events in the context of urban development, but rather to moments embedded in the ordinary, everyday urban world. Through the mediation of digital technologies, street life is increasingly illuminated by the “spotlights” of urban theater and social media, acquiring a distinctly performative quality. The “diving grandpas of Tianjin” emerged precisely under these circumstances.

Amid the attention of passersby, short videos, and digital technology, a kind of urban theater took shape around the Lion Forest Bridge on the Haihe River in Tianjin. Here, the “Tianjin grandpas” stepped into the limelight and swiftly became celebrities both online and offline. They adapted readily to the theatrical atmosphere, deliberately reinforcing their personas by performing warm-ups and splits before diving, and even delivering short speeches. They infused their dives with theatrical energy, aiming to win the applause and admiration of their audience. With spectators both in person and online, their performances grew increasingly confident and polished.

What began as individual dives soon evolved into tandem dives, and eventually into synchronized group performances. More and more diving grandpas joined the “cast,” becoming stars under the public gaze. These performers displayed a keen sense of role identity and knew how to energize the crowd. Their dives, accompanied by the cheers of onlookers, became highly performative visual spectacles and media events, which in turn attracted even more residents and tourists.

The “Tianjin grandpas diving” phenomenon is far from a solo act. Alongside the grandpas in the spotlight, tourists from other cities, livestream hosts, internet influencers, and even professional divers have contributed to a rich variety of urban performances. Each participant has the potential capacity to shape the development of this urban spectacle.

As the narrative surrounding “Tianjin grandpas diving” continues to evolve, the Lion Forest Bridge, as a theater of traffic and attention, begins to influence nearby urban spaces and the operational order of local street life, revealing the narrative-driving power of rapidly concentrating and continually diffusing urban flows. This surge of irregular attention activates the self-protective mechanisms of the urban theater as a “non-human actor.” In Actor-Network Theory, French philosopher Bruno Latour defines non-human actors as entities that, by making a difference, alter the status quo. In the later stages of the narrative, the urban theater itself plays a key role as a narrative subject, guiding the direction of the spectacle.

The involvement and co-construction of multiple narrative agents form the basis by which street life is transformed into a world of spectacle. Vivid street stories are inseparable from the daily practices of individuals as narrative agents. Meanwhile, the theatricalized storytelling of urban spectacle highlights the relational dynamics among individuals, groups, and the city itself. Through role-playing, contextual cues, and the mediation of urban theater, the narrative of urban spectacle creates a nested relationship between individual, collective, and urban life. This theatricalized performance further embeds itself within the broader framework of urban cultural dissemination. At the same time, such performances heighten the tension between spectacle-driven storytelling and the governance of urban order.

Vitality and life force of everyday life

Today, countless “internet-famous” spots are continuously emerging, created largely through digital media platforms. People enthusiastically “check in” at these places, continually creating new “locales.” However, many of these trendy sites are closely tied to urban economic development and commercial capital, often lacking the lived vitality and life force embedded in authentic street life. Against this backdrop, modern cities are developing more diversified urban cultures rich in everyday atmosphere through a wide variety of digital media practices. It is via this process that more humanized and locally distinctive “urban streetscapes” come to the fore. More specifically, urban spectacles in the digital era exhibit a special vitality and life force for two main reasons.

First, digital media technology injects more abundant narrative energy into urban spectacles. Through digital mediation, such urban spectacles take on a “de-spatialization” quality—allowing us to share experiences with those who are not physically present. Urban publics are no longer formed solely by synchronous spatial usage but increasingly through diverse online platforms. The development of spectacle narratives and their effects gather more narrative agents and energy through this de-spatialization. Narratively, the content evolves from live urban theater performances to image revision enabled by media technologies. Ours is an era of spectacle or image; much of today’s visual experience is technologically mediated. The viral spread of urban street spectacles depends heavily on the transformation and extension of such technological imagery, through which mundane street life becomes more emotionally resonant through re-narration via technology.

Second, although urban spectacles on digital platforms may gradually fade in popularity and return from a “non-daily” to a daily state as social media attention wanes, the activities themselves rarely vanish entirely from urban spaces due to decreased traffic. Street life is a stable mode of living— formed over time by city residents, deeply rooted in a city’s historical development, and closely tied to individual daily life and cultural habits, thus exhibiting strong continuity and vitality. The emergence of “urban spectacles” can be viewed as a distinctive mark and creative reimagining of people’s everyday street life. In this process, urban spectacles not only illuminate simple street activities, but more importantly, revive the city’s spirit and cultural heritage embedded within street culture with renewed vitality.

Zeng Yiguo (professor) and Kong Yinuo are from the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University.